See how the talented perfumer, Sarah McCartney is making magic with her homemade fragrances

By Sarah Emily Gilbert

If you were to have asked a young Sarah McCartney what she wanted to be when she grew up, she wouldn’t have said teacher, doctor, or lawyer. Instead, Sarah would’ve told you that she wanted to do magic when she grew up, and not just tricks, real magic.

Fast-forward to 2015, and you’ll find Sarah McCartney in her lab, mixing concoctions in order to create custom perfumes for her London based microperfumery, 4160 Tuesdays. Crafting fragrances that evoke memories and excite the mind, McCartney is, in fact, producing a sort of magic. Inspired by people, places, imaginings, music, and interesting raw materials, McCartney has mastered the art of transforming the world into scents. Most intriguing of all, McCartney learned how to perform this magic all on her own.

While working as the writer for the handmade cosmetics company, LUSH for 14 years, McCartney developed a desire to work behind the scenes, making the beautifully scented products about which she wrote. But, before heading into the lab, McCartney decided to combine her interests by writing a novel about a perfumer who solves people’s problems by making them a personal scent. Tired of waiting on agents and publishers, McCartney decided to make the premise of her novel into her reality.

After reading hundreds of books and experimenting with an equal number of essential oils, McCartney started to make custom perfumes. While McCartney credits her olfactory expertise to a “combination of creativity, daring, practice, and a head full of new ideas,” it is perhaps, her lifelong affair with smells that brought McCartney success.

“The first scent I enjoyed was the mock orange blossom in our garden, but the one I first remember experiencing is the smell of boiling laundry in our 1950s, second-hand washing machine. I appreciated the mock orange so much that I stuffed some of the buds up my nose so far that I had to be taken to the doctor to have them extracted. (I probably did it to take away the smell of hot cottons).”

In her older age, McCartney has learned to use the scent of mock orange blossoms in a tad more refined manner, but she still has a penchant for fruity scents. While her favorite smell comes from the huge fronds of tiny white flowers on her next-door neighbor’s palm tree, McCartney’s signature scent style is laden with a combination of peach, grapefruit, blackcurrant, and raspberry with added opoponax (also known as sweet myrrh).

“I think I have a certain style, but for every scent my process is different. I’m usually trying to capture a real or an imaginary place and time, like Sunshine and Pancakes – a warm body at the ends of a day at the beach, eating British pancakes with honey and lemon juice. Given the choice, I’d put fruit scents into everything I make. That’s why it’s really useful to collaborate with others who have a clear idea of what they would like to smell, and who shove me gently outside of my perfume comfort zone. For example, without the Italian stylist, Silvia Bergomi, I would never have made Rome 1963, which is white flowers, woods, and tobacco, her vision of a scene from a Fellini film.”

Even when a client has a definite scent in mind, it takes exceptional talent to transform a potentially overpowering smell, like smoke, into a beautiful perfume. McCartney’s most recent scent, “Maxed Out” is the perfect example of her skill. After reviewing some of McCartney’s perfumes, Max Heusler of New York City decided to give her the task of creating a perfume that encapsulated his earlier days of debauchery.

“It was such an irresistible challenge to see if I could put it together in a bottle: marijuana cigars, buckets of rum cocktails, high class escorts, blackouts and regret. I added in some coffee because I thought he needed it. I named it, Max loved it and now it’s going into production.”

And while custom scents like those designed for Bergomi and Heusler would normally come in at about $7,500, McCartney doesn’t believe in charging silly amounts for fragrances. 4160 Tuesdays’ perfume prices fairly represent the materials and time needed for the creation of each scent. However, it seems as though the beauty (and magic) involved in perfumery is more valued by McCartney than any monetary amount.

“At the age of four, I had no idea what I would be doing later in life, but in my wildest imaginings this probably would have been it. It’s the closest to making magic spells as I can get.”